Victims of China's one-child policy find hope

FIVE young girls, found starving and close to death amid the rubbish tips of Beijing, have been given a new life thanks to the love and compassion of a poor couple in the Chinese capital.

The girls were abandoned as babies - victims of China's one-child policy coupled with a traditional preference for sons. Each had been dumped to die by parents who either wanted their only child to be a boy or did not want the burden of a disfigured or disabled infant.

They were saved by Lao Ye and his wife Chen Rong, who are bringing up the girls as their daughters. The couple, who have two sons of their own, were able to get round the one-child policy because of lax supervision by authorities in slum and migrant-dominated suburbs.

Yet while they have saved the lives of the five babies they found, thousands more die after being dumped. Many abandoned children are sent to orphanages where the mortality rate is often high. China has been relaxing its strict one-child policy is recent years but many people, particularly in urban areas, are still at risk of penalties if they have a second child.

This can pressure poorer mothers into abandoning unwanted babies, while ultra-sound scan and abortion of female foetuses is not uncommon among the more affluent classes. The growth of prostitution and enormous swelling in China's migrant population in recent years have contributed to the problem. While the country's former family planning minister, Peng Peiyun, has called for something to be done about the babies left to die, government officials continue to ignore the scandal.

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Mrs Chen said: "I couldn't bear to see children abandoned. The people who dumped these children are hard-hearted to have so little love or affection for their own babies. They have treated them with utter cruelty." The family's only income comes from the meagre findings they scrounge among the rubbish discarded by Beijing's newly affluent residents who live in recently built boulevards a short walk from the couple's two-room hovel.

The couple found the first of the girls, Simeng, on a bitter winter's day six years ago. Cold and hungry, Mr Ye was foraging among the bins outside the Beijing Hotel when he found the emaciated child. As he lifted her from a filthy bin, he thought at first that she was dead. When he detected a faint heartbeat, the former university lecturer wrapped the infant in his jacket and brought her home to his wife in the slum township of Xinzhuang.

Simply closing the lid and leaving the baby girl to die was not an option, he insists. He said: "She was a living person. How could I possibly have left her there?" Although barely able to feed her two sons, his wife agreed that they must keep the baby. They called her Simeng, which means "remember your origins". Now a pretty, vibrant youngster, she has benefited from surgery to correct the hare lip that may have led her birth mother to abandon her.

Over the years, the couple have added the four other little girls - Sien, four, Enhui, three, Guomiao, two and one-year-old Guoqing - to their family. Simeng knows that her "sisters" are all foundlings but the couple have never plucked up the courage to tell her that she is, too.

Mr Ye, 63, whose leathery, lined face reflects the harsh life endured by the Beijing underclass, said: "We dare not tell her in case she cannot deal with the truth. She knows all the other girls are from the garbage but when she first asked us where she came from, we told her she was our own dearly-loved child."

Simeng was with her mother when the baby of the family was found on October 1 last year. While national leaders staged a parade to celebrate 50 years of communist rule, Chen was rummaging on a tip east of Beijing's Fourth Ring Road. The baby kicked at the flap of a box. As Simeng looked on, Chen pulled out the filthy child and wrapped her in her own threadbare clothes. She named the starving infant Guoqing, meaning "National Day".

Caring for their growing family costs the couple everything they can earn and has eaten up all they own. They receive no government assistance. All the girls have needed expensive medical treatment. This has been a particularly heavy burden for the couple as China has no national health service and they have no employer to fund health care.

Guoqing has a hare lip, Guomiao and Enhui have cleft palates and Sien has a heart condition. The cost of correcting their problems is immense for a couple who can barely pay their £30-a-month rent. When Enhui was admitted to the Beijing Medical University hospital last year for an operation to repair the cleft palate that left her without teeth and unable to speak, the medical staff estimated that the procedure would cost £2,300.

The couple were able to raise only £150 but the surgery went ahead after doctors and nurses raised the rest. The only assistance the family has received has been a concession by the education committee of the local district authority to waive the school fees for Simeng's kindergarten.

Since Beijing Television ran a short programme on the couple last year, Communist Party officials have visited the house and given them toys and clothing. The doctors who treated Enhui have also given them some free medical care. The bulk of the burden of caring for the girls, however, has fallen on the couple.

Mr Ye, once hailed by officials as a "model worker" while teaching at the Jiangxi Communist Labour University, fell upon hard times after he was summoned to work in Beijing in 1973. At the time, China was in the final stages of the Cultural Revolution and Mr Ye lost his job.

Unable to return to the town that he had left as an upstanding official, he took a job as live-in carer for an elderly intellectual attached to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. After the old man died, Mr Ye met and later married Chen Rong, and the couple continued to live in the professor's house in central Beijing.

Two years later, the couple were plunged into hardship when the neighbourhood was razed to make way for one of the first of Beijing's Western-style shopping and office districts. Without a lease or any other form of property rights, the couple were forced to move out to Xinzhuang to join the thousands of other dispossessed who are forced to make a living from the discarded remnants of the new materialist society that China has embraced.

Their little daughters were all found with scribbled notes - giving scant details of their births - pinned to their clothing. At first, Mr Ye was hopeful that the mothers could be traced so that the babies could be reunited with them. Disillusionment, however, soon set in. He said: "I had hoped we could track down their parents but why would anyone come forward and say they had thrown their baby on a rubbish tip? It's against the law, so why would they dare?"

Now the old man makes a pointless record, writing down where and when the children were found. He said: "That's the best we can do." In spite of their cramped conditions and money shortages, the couple say they would be quite prepared to take in more foundlings. Above the makeshift bed where the five girls sleep, Mr Ye has placed a bright red Chinese character, meaning "love".

He said: "Love is something that does still exist in human society. We bring these children up as our own and just live from one day to the next. Who knows what will happen tomorrow?"